By Andrei Skvarsky.
Lebanon-based Bank Audi has adopted a device developed by US technology company Nexmo to maintain direct contact with customers through WhatsApp, an increasingly popular means of communication worldwide.
Nexmo’s business application programming interface (API) solution enables Lebanon’s largest bank to make its contact with customers more personal and contextual and provide them with more extensive information about its products, the lender said in a statement.
Nexmo, a San Francisco-headquartered developer and marketer of communication APIs, argues that WhatsApp offers various communication advantages to banks and financial companies.
People aged between 15 and 25 prefer WhatsApp to email and regular phones, according to Nexmo, which says one reason is that WhatsApp is free of charge to use.
It enables banks to market their products more quickly – citing research by Forbes magazine, Nexmo says present-day young people typically have an attention span of between eight and 12 seconds.
Moreover, WhatsApp messages are securely encryped end-to-end, according to Nexmo, which is a San-Francisco-headquartered subsidiary of Vonage, a cloud communications provider based in New Jersey.
WhatsApp may be a help to banks that have to close some of their branches, Nexmo argues.
“The importance of mobile communication is now an established fact,” Bank Audi’s statement quoted the lender’s CEO for Lebanon, Marc Audi, as saying.
“This is why it has become a necessity to communicate with customers the way they expect us to, starting with notifications and chat support, and offering more functionalities going forward.”
Bank Audi, which is headquartered in Beirut, has operations in much of the Middle East and in Europe.
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